


Red Right Hand

by The_Rolling_Tomes



Series: From Amber (Forged on Gielinor, Razwan Bahir, Phase One) [19]
Category: Runescape (Video Games)
Genre: Adult Language, Blades and Knives, Crime Because I mean Look Who's Here, Does reference Runescape Archaeology elements, Don't @ Me, Implied/Referenced Sex, Multi, Orgy Aftermath, Pickled cabbage was harmed in the writing of this fic, Razwan's Post-Orgy Disclaimer as Recited By Razwan, There is one light vore joke this is Not A Pattern, Warning: Bubbleguts and Liquor Shits, implied threat of violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-10
Updated: 2020-09-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:07:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26394637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Rolling_Tomes/pseuds/The_Rolling_Tomes
Summary: Acknowledging Archaeology, Razwan-Style. It's not common for her to have a satisfying day at work.Alternative title: I Am A Goddamned Adult.
Relationships: Razwan/Nomad/Sliske
Series: From Amber (Forged on Gielinor, Razwan Bahir, Phase One) [19]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/740061
Comments: 5
Kudos: 9





	Red Right Hand

_I want your whiskey mouth_  
 _All over my blonde south_  
 _Red wine, cheap perfume and a filthy pout_  
 _Tonight bring all your friends_  
 _Because a group does it better_  
  
Lady GaGa - "Heavy Metal Lover"

There was a knock at the door.

I stretched, further maligning an already twisted blanket into tighter coils of useless fabric, discovering a tangle of limbs not my own scattered above and below the ones belonging to me.

We were on the floor, mostly, with a few anonymous covered lumps claiming what minimal furniture occupied the room. My body felt well-exercised and the skin’s itchiness redolent of evaporated sweat’s salty leavings. Probably wasn’t the only salty residue on my skin, given the company and that company’s nudity, but a repeat of the insistent knock meant there wasn’t time to examine my canvas and whatever’d been applied there. Or find my clothes.

I disentangled myself and wormed into a sitting position, rising to stand. The blanket that’d done me a disservice in the night would make up for its treachery now. I reached down, shook it out, and wrapped the light green weave around myself just beneath my arms. I picked a way through the softly snoring human detritus with one arm held dutifully over my front, like a noblewoman determined to preserve dignity while someone’s dried ejaculate kept a hank of hair plastered to her shoulder. A sliver of headache threaded through the back of my well-abused skull as I worked the latch up and opened the door.

Thick morning sunlight elbowed its burnished way through my corneas and installed molten agony before Sliske’s transplanted matter adjusted the brilliance and gentled the pain. It occurred to me to thank him next time he poured himself from the shadows into my vicinity, and I looked down.

A woman stood on the stoop of the building - _some building, where the hell am I, anyway? -_ looking stern and unhappy. Strawberry blonde hair had been subjugated into a pair of taut tails, jutting out as though eager to be well away from the rest of her head. _Handlebars,_ I thought, then took in the tensed, preparatory hunch of her shoulders.

_Here we go._

I looked up, deciding that if a punch was coming I was too hung over to do anything about it, and closed my eyes. “I apologize for sleeping with your husband. Or your wife.” I heard her begin to say something and batted air with my free hand as I went on. “If I slept with you, please pass along my apology to your understandably distressed spouse. If I slept with both of you and you’re here looking to arrange something more, I’m not interested, whether with one or both of you. I have enough shit on my plate as it is.” I paused, thinking back. “If you’re here about the barking, that was all done by people here. Nothing untoward happened to your or any actual dogs-”

**_“I beg your pardon?”_ **

It was the tone. I opened my eyes and looked down again, this time taking in how put together she seemed for this time of morning, her scandalized expression, and the little gloved hand which trapped a very formal-looking envelope against her chest.

_Ah, fuck’s sake. Where the hell am I? Varrock? I think Varrock. Gotta be._ “So, anyway, praise Saradomin. May you uncover the vilest heathens and spread the blessings of blue, uh, blessedness-”

“I am _not_ here to recruit you, and certainly not for him. I have a message for the World Guardian from none other than Doctor Nabanik, and I intend to see it delivered personally.” She was nearly vibrating, and I lamented how useful that would’ve been in other circumstances.

But these weren’t those. “World Guardian? Sounds important.”

She huffed. _“Very._ Now, if you’d stop deflecting, I have something important to do, Miss… ?”  
  
“Bahir. Hey, good luck with the hunt. I hear the World Guardian’s tough to scare up nowadays.” I began shutting the door.

The hand not holding the envelope whipped out and slapped the door, stopping its progress. “I’m not amused! Doctor Nabanik told me you’d be like this.” Door halted, she looked up and seemed to take in my eyes for the first time. She muttered something like _demonling_ but seemed to gather herself, and I credited her a mental point even if she was ruining my morning. “This is for you.”

She jammed the envelope through the door and shook it insistently at me. I gave up shutting the heavy piece of wood between us and took it from her, fingers bending it into a stiff cone, and slapped her retreating hand with it. “Don’t wiggle shit at me unless you’re offering a good time.”

Her inarticulate, high yelp of outrage was music to my ears, volume and all. She looked fresh from biting into a lemon and ground out, “Zaros to smite you, irreverent whore.”

I shrugged at her, decanting some of my irritation into what felt like a vulturine grin. “Zaros? The only reason he’s not limping around bleeding moody god juice all over the ruins of his own temple is because I took pity on a very lonely, talkative ball of divine energy trapped on Freneskae. Tell that piece of haunted armor _the whore_ said hello.”

She made another noise that resonated catastrophically with my headache and I shut the door, turning and retracing my steps through the torpid scatter of bodies. Finding a little portion of unused trunk space, I sat down, letting the blanket fall and dipping finger into the clothlike fold of the envelope. The trunk’s other occupant lay half across it and half atop a chair, one part of him awake and pressing pyramid in the middle of his blanket. I ignored temptation and pulled the paper free.

_World Guardian,_

_I trust this finds you well._

I knew for a fact he was hoping it would find me in a ditch, or a jail cell, and wondered idly if he’d ever tasted lemons.

_In any case, I’m certain you’ve heard of the quinti-pronged archaeological efforts taking place across Gielinor._

There was probably a scathing joke to be made about Zaros’s crystalline prongs and Azzanadra’s seating arrangements, but I was entirely too sober to make it.

_Though I’d normally seek more knowledgeable persons in these pursuits, in the spirit of cooperation, I offer you some information: one of the Zamorakians involved in excavation has been discovered by both your and my people to be trading information, as well as selling artefacts to the highest bidder. I’m sure you can deduce why that’s a problem._

I could, and Azzanadra’s glancing blow didn’t connect straight away. It was an interesting problem. I had a feeling my morning would’ve been letter-free had the person apprehended limited themselves to pilfering from one site, Zarosian or Zamorakian. Both meant information was passing through a conduit of indeterminate size.

_His name is Micah Beaumont. We’ve prohibited him from revisiting the Kharid-Et site, however, I believe he retains access to the source of your god’s infernal interest. Given the nature of your leader, I’m certain the pilferer will meet with justice both swift and fair._

I bristled, rereading. He’d been within range as I’d spoken to Armadyl and been troubled by what the aviansie god had to say, but this had to be more than a stab at Zamorak’s part in everything there. Azzanadra used a fuckdamned lot of words, but never idly.

_I will leave you to do as you must. May you meet with success._

_\- Doctor Nabanik_

_To do as I must?_ I snarled at the parchment. He seemed awfully certain of Beaumont’s fate for someone who hadn’t sealed it himself. He also hadn’t contacted whomever was heading things at the Zamorakian site in his “spirit of cooperation,” but had instead tapped me. I was many things, some of them useful to Zamorak, but not a dirt scrubber.

“Of fuckin’ course.” I tossed the letter and its envelope into an overfilled waste basket and stood, glancing around wishing bitterly that Azzanadra’s errand girl hadn’t found me. I was in the mood for a stiff morning drink and loosened inhibitions. Now I was saddled with this. No matter where I went or how scandalous I made my own company, Azzanadra had a way of distancing himself further yet refining his ability to make my life miserable.

_I will leave you to do as you must._

I decided my misery deserved company. 

  
  


\----------------------

  
  


Micah jerked awake at the sound of a jar lid popping open. The suction and release was loud in the little abandoned two-room shack he’d claimed, a sentient and deliberate noise made almost tactile in the space’s condensing atmosphere. Even in the smallness of the area, it was close.

“What the hell is this?”

It was spoken conversationally, with no effort made to speak so a listener mightn’t hear. Stealth’s absence worked around Micah’s first instinct - to keep feigning sleep - and he opened his eyes.

She sat on his table, one leg dangling in free swing and the other with a bootheel groove-locked on the edge of the wood. Her thin armor was an odd mixture of leather, chain, and fabric he couldn’t discern a collective purpose for, although the effect was interesting in the dimness of lantern light. She kept herself thus, a few errant strands of black hair hanging free along the sides of her face as she looked down at the jar she held and prodded into its contents with a knife.

Spearing a long, irregularly layered pad of pickled cabbage, she lifted it out of the jar and tapped it against the rim. She bit, grimaced, and hissed, _“khassif,”_ but kept chewing as she looked up at him.

He lost the urge to sit up on the couch almost instantly. He’d seen eyes just so only once before, during an exchange with their owner in the bogged southern depths of Morytanian swampland. Black-amber-black they’d been as the wholly terrifying Sliske had introduced himself with venom-laced urbanity, told Micah to keep his digging tools well away from “his prized collection,” and plucked the wand of some long-dead mage out of his unprotesting hand.

_“I happen to know the owner of this, my good man. While seeing him aggravated delights me, I think we’ll leave it to his use rather than yours. You look like a capable thief. It may make something of a hypocrite of me, but I’m certain you can find better than the dead to pilfer from. Go on, shoo.”_

Micah stared with a kind of prey’s resignation into the eyes and clutched the blanket covering himself. “I never went back for the wand.”

His visitor paused in chewing, rolled those eyes in a way both coloration and glow exaggerated, and spoke around the mouthful of cabbage while tapping the rest of the dripping mass against the jar’s rim. “I’m not Sliske.” She wiggled the knife and its catch at him. “This. Is disgusting. What is it?”

“My mother’s recipe for pickled cabbage.” His fingernails dug through the thin material of the blanket and into his palms. “Who are you?”

“A visitor with some friendly advice.” She took another bite, this one accompanied by a less repulsed expression, and seemed to consider him. “You look like you couldn’t sell ice to a Menaphite. That must come in handy in your line of work.”

There it was. “I told Nabanik I’d stay away from Kharid-Et.” He’d been lying, of course, but he hadn’t planned on making a proper dishonest man of himself for another week or two.

“Mhm. Bet the feathers bobbed on his stupid hat when he nodded along, huh?”

The conversation wasn’t going anywhere he expected. He knew well enough that people didn’t break into others’ homes - or allude to their criminal exploits - to make friendly conversation, but what could he do? Run? He couldn’t get off the couch without announcing to his guest he’d foregone pants somewhere along the furious business of the previous night’s drinking. There was no reason to play unthreatening around him. He couldn’t have fended off a rat in his state.

He agreed. “Hard to look at him when they go.” He watched her gnaw a laborious circuit around the cabbage and started to sit up. “I’m not going back.”

“You’re right.” She pulled another bite and snapped her knife arm in a throw. Micah heard the blade embed itself in the wood above his head and fell back to his side, guts and nuts retracting in fear.

“Bad idea.” The same hand that’d held the previous knife curled, fingertips close to the wrist, and drew an identical little knife from somewhere beneath her sleeve. It spun once between those same fingers before being moved into her old hold, and she went back to stabbing into the jar. “Do that again and my advice stops being delivered in words.”

He waited. As he did, he realized his innards’ protest had expedited digestive movement and he very desperately needed to take a shit.

His visitor continued prospecting for a new piece of cabbage and returned to the amicable voice she’d used before. “Look up.”

Micah looked toward the ceiling. A fat beetle trundled along the rough wood, its shadow growing and shrinking, thrashed by the inconsistent lantern light thrown from the end table near him.

“No, you alley-priced quisling.” She pointed to somewhere above and behind him with the knife, which had somehow discovered and pierced an even larger section of cabbage than the first. “Right up there, behind you.”

He looked. The knife protruding from the wall behind him was a simple thing, smooth and darkened steel with a minimalist’s handle, save for the bull’s rack sigil just below where the full tang slipped into the thin wood. The light’s angle offered enough to see the red stain some artisan had used to liven the edges of each curve. Above the sigil, even the vinegar-soaked, ragged piece of vegetable looked sharp and menacing.

“Understand now?”

Micah did. He looked back at her.

She’d stopped attacking the cabbage on her new knife and set the jar on the table. “I’m his Arcana Ferrum. Know what that is?”

He knew. His insides knotted further and prickly sweat compounded his ails. He nodded and stretched his legs as far as he could, cross-locking his feet together, acutely aware of his brewing physiological emergency.

“Good.” She slid her knife along the edge of the table, scraping away the leaves and watching them drop wetly to the floor, then began to wipe her knife down with one of the cleanest among his artefact cloths on the table. “You can quit squirming. I’m not here to tidy up.”

_That’s not why I’m squirming. A few more minutes and I’m going to beg you to kill me._ Though it wasn’t exactly true, it was getting increasingly difficult to think.

“In fact,” she’d hidden her knife away again, and wrapped her arms around her bent leg and kept the other one swinging, “I don’t want to be here. I was having a _very_ good time until someone put you in my path.”

Micah dug his fingernails into his palm a little more and tried to sound calm as he said, “Miss, I need a few minutes in the other room.”

She looked drawn short. She passed a glance through the little doorway and the facilities beyond it, then back at him. “You’re serious.”

_Serious as death._ “It’s not windowed.”

“I see that.” She seemed to squint at him, reassessing his appearance and inability to remain still. “Fine, go.”

“I’m not wearing any-”

“-I’ve seen worse. Go.” She waved an arm in the direction of the other room. “I can’t explain anything to you with you doing the full lower deck shimmy.”

He moved stiffly, bubbling guts grumbling anew, and sped from the cover of his blanket into the other room. He kicked the door partway shut, putting himself just out of her direct line of sight, and landed on the seat.

The sounds were viscous, explosive. Micah couldn’t stifle several long groans of relief.

From the other room, he heard his visitor lose her composure. Softer laughs became cackles as his ordeal went on. By the time he’d flushed, he’d heard some coughing - he hoped a vicious little hope the smell had something to do with it - and what sounded suspiciously like a helpless snort. He snatched a towel by the bath basin and wrapped it around his midsection, opening the door and returning to his place on the couch.

“You _were_ serious.” Her odd, Sliskean eyes looked even stranger crescented in humor and she pressed fingers beneath them to wipe away tears. “Didn’t know you were in here building bombs.”

He sat, feeling internally deflated from the ribs downward, almost weak from it, but relieved. “Cheap liquor.”

“That’ll do it to you.” She let her other leg join its companion in swinging, gripping the edge of the table and leaning forward. “I’ll make it short so I can get the hell out of this fart box.”

_Hopefully I’ll be able to leave it after you do._

She looked around herself, at the restoration paraphernalia on the table. She played with an untidy heap of vellum scraps as she spoke. “Doctor Nabanik seems pretty sure I’m just going to kill you and solve his problem for him.”

Micah swallowed. “But you’re not.”

“I’m not.” She folded and bent with her fingers. “One of the upsides of being trusted by Zamorak is that the trust extends to me handling situations for myself. Thinking through them so he doesn’t have to deal with every small issue.”

She started picking up vellum trimmings and placing them carefully on the empty space next to her, one by one. “Zamorak would probably have you killed and wouldn’t think about it much. Simple solution. But an incomplete one.”

He tried to sound reasonable rather than cowardly. “Because he doesn’t know who I sold to.”

“Right. Nobody’s going to go asking for you if they know where you wound up, which is why nobody needs to know where you wind up. We need people asking those questions.” She looked up from her vellum placement project and gave him another dose of her disquieting gaze. “You follow?”

He nodded. “Lay low.”

“Low as you can go. And stay that way.” She pointed at the wall behind him where her knife rested. “A few days, and I can use that time to explain to Zamorak why keeping you alive will root out your cohorts better than a torture session. Probably all the time after that so new things can occupy his attention and keep you out of it.”

Micah’s innards trilled a wet alert that not all his business was finished, but he could wait. “Where?”

“Doesn’t matter. Away.”

“Why are you helping me?”

She went back to whatever she was doing with his vellum scraps. “I’m helping Zamorak and making life difficult for Doctor Nabanik. This isn’t a mercy intervention.”

He considered what had to be involved in getting the rank she had and tasted the truth in her words. “Still. Thank you.”

She hopped from the table and stood, her armor making a few muted scraping sounds until she left contact with the wood, at which point it was silent and Micah began seeing its usefulness. 

She answered him. “Sure.” She made her way to the shack’s front door and opened it. Over her shoulder, she said, “use proxies. Nobody should ever know who you are when you’re fencing shit. Get a window for that other room.”

She left. Micah remained sitting for a time, feeling very dull of wit and shamed, yet elated for still being alive. He stood, readjusting his towel, and padded over to the table where his visitor had been toying with his things. Though uncertain, it’d looked like she was making something with his scraps.

Expecting a knife, or Zamorak’s mark, or some other potent warning patterned together with vellum, he looked down at the table.

Badly proportioned yet surprisingly clear, she’d made a large set of vellum butt cheeks. Thinner, ragged pieces had been strung together in a thin stream from between the meaty mockups and into a thick pile. More thin pieces had been placed together to form letters, the words OH NO exclaiming in a child’s overexaggerated print.  
  
Micah stared at it for a while, then scooped the pieces back together with the rest.

  
  


\----------------------

  
  


I moved with care through the nearly lightless room and towards my bed. Quen was away, I knew, but there was nevertheless a form beneath the blanket, and process of elimination left one being for a possibility. That the shape extended from the top to the bottom of the customized furnishing added likeliness where little was needed.

He shifted as I clambered onto the bed. Going from his side to his back, his arms came out from beneath the blanket and scooped me into an inexorable embrace I allowed, even melted into.

“Good evening, love. Your form is exquisite and your breath is foul. What _have_ you been into? Had I known our role play involved you frolicking in dead things to mark yourself I might’ve reconsidered.”

“Eat me.” I clung to him through the blanket. “Pickled cabbage.”

Sliske made a dramatic noise. “How vile. A ghoul wouldn’t put a tongue on you, smelling like that. You ask entirely too much of me.”

I tucked the blanket down and revealed a bit of the chest I knew to be nude beneath it. “I’m not asking.” I licked him.

He play-bucked, nothing hard enough to wound but his dedication to the performance drawing giggles out of me. “Did you just-?”

I licked again, working up to a collarbone. “You like it.”

“Disgusting!” He squirmed and held my shoulders, lifting me and looking up at me. “Now we both require bathing.”

“Oh, how terrible.” I pawed at him and tried my hand at his theatrical energy. “However shall you see fit to go on?”

“Too much, love. Needed a few more lines about the revolting scent before accelerating to existential moaning.” His amber irises roved over me. “You’re in an interesting mood.”

I shrugged so much as the hold would allow. “Getting one over on Azzanadra makes me wet.”

“I see.” He set me down on his chest and gestured into the darkened room. “And I, the long-suffering receptacle for your wantonness, unloved for my own worth but a mere bondsman, slave to your outsourced lusts-”

He felt good and I wiggled a bit. “Your dramaturgy makes me wet, too.”

“You wound me only to exercise your capacity to heal, pet. Though I do enjoy my influence on your vocabulary.” He moved to exit the blanket’s confines and I maneuvered myself to make it easier. He stood, then claimed me in a carry hold and walked with a nighttime predator’s confidence through the darkness toward stairs leading to the pool. “Is Azzanadra going to present a problem in the near future? I hope he is.”

“Not this time. He left something in my care.”

“That’s odd. Has he met you before?”

“Thank you, your support means everything to me.”

He laughed. “That’s usually my line, love. Inspiration is one thing, but stealing another’s material is considered bad form.”

He carried me down the stairs. At the bottom, I squirmed and he allowed me down. “What if I do steal your material? What’ll you do to get it back?”

Sliske growled mock-menacingly. “Careful, dear one. I was once the premier executor of the Empire’s most secret machinations. And extracted no shortage of secrets from, shall we say, less-than-willing sources.”

“Ooh, scary. I thought you just let demons eat people.”

The affront was clear in his voice. “I never let others do my work for me, tiresome as most of it was.”

I paused, turning, and looked at him. “You didn’t eat anyone. Your mouth isn’t big enough.”

He shrugged. “I am a shapeshifter.”

“You did not eat people.”

“I decline to comment further.”

_“Sliske!”_

“You never complain when I eat you. If anything you invite that very-”

**_“Sliske!”_ **

**Author's Note:**

> 100% happy self-indulgence here. This one felt good to write, and was *fun* to write.
> 
> The title's taken from a song of the same name, by Nick Cave and Bad Seeds. Phritzie, who has a scary-cool level of insight into Razwan's whole vibe, introduced me to that song (and several others), and damn if it's not eerie how relevant the lyrics are. Every bit. Holy fuck. Also, if you need a Delectable-Sliske fix, I can't recommend Phritzie's writing enough.


End file.
